Author: Gil

Last Saturday, Amy & I went to a going-away party for an old pal of mine. I got to catch up with a bunch of guys I used to watch Yankees games with during that great run when they won four World Series in five years. I hadn’t seen any of them for much of the past decade, so there was a ton to talk about.

I also got to meet and have a long conversation with a guy whom our hostess had been trying to connect me with for years. We’d friended each other on Facebook, but had never sat down to talk. I had a great time at the party, talking about publishing (he works at the HQ of a major book retailer), e-books, how impossible it is to keep up (in a general sense), whom we’re reading (he: Eudora Welty’s short stories, me: that Anthony Powell series), SEO and the gaming of, um, every aspect of the world, our obsolescence, and more. It turned out that he’d been checking out Virtual Memories for a while, and made a reference to my Monday Morning Montaigne posts near the end of the evening.

I told him I was thinking of annihilating all traffic to this blog by replicating the MMM experience with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. He said he was thinking of getting back into Plutarch, and I told him to let me know if does, so we can launch the New Jersey Atheneum. (Or form a book club. Whatever normalish people do.)

The next day, I looked him up on Facebook to drop him a line and thank him for the good conversation. On his profile page, I discovered that he’d attended St. John’s College (Santa Fe branch). “If only I’d known!” I thought. I could’ve talked with him about my recent reading of Homer instead of just trying to vaguely allude to things, for fear of coming off like a classics weird. (Which I am, but hey.)

And it’s not like we spent our time talking about American Idol and The Jersey Shore or anything. We really got into conversation. But it occurred to me that the bond of the St. John’s curriculum — even in the truncated form in which I received it, as part of the Graduate Institute — was tantamount to having another language. It was struck by the notion that the St. John’s education was like a secret society. Talking to another initiate, I could’ve dropped the pretense of normal talk and actually delved into those books that we shared.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how rare it is that I get to talk about those books and share in that conversation. (My wife’s a voracious reader, but didn’t go to St. John’s.)

Many years ago, one of my best pals joined me for drinks with two other Johnnies. The four of us shot the breeze in what I thought was a congenial but not too Great Books-y way. After, my pal told me, “I felt like I should have been wearing a pair of overalls and a straw hat, with a hayseed in my mouth.” He’s a smart, well-read guy, yet felt totally out of his depth. And it’s not like we were discussing Kant!

When my pal from the party wrote me back a few days later, he told me that he’d enjoyed the evening and was glad to talk to someone “who has also been ruined by reading.” He also sent me a link to this great article on The Revolt of the Elites.

(I had sent him The Awl’s great one on SEO.)